These men, your relatives, confreres in religion and friends, are about to be ordained to the priesthood or to the diaconate. What is unusual is that these are monks who will exercise their ministry not in the typical priestly milieux of parishes and communities serving the lay faithful, but, in stable fashion, in this Abbey of Sept-Fons or in some other sister monastic community.

Recent documents of the Magisterium on the priesthood, from the Second Vatican Council onwards, mainly take the diocesan model of priestly life as the norm. These descriptions of the priesthood focus on the diocesan priest’s ministry and his relationship with his bishop.

This model seems not only to ignore but at times even contradict aspects of the monk-priest’s life. Someone might reason, for example, that the contemplative priest is exempted from many aspects of normal priestly ministry in order to facilitate his life of prayer.

But monks might find such a view as answer unsatisfactory because it seems to regard monastic life as basically incompatible with the priesthood. For the phenomenon of monastic priesthood is of great antiquity – in the sixth century St. Benedict was already dealing with the incorporation of priests into the monastic community as well as the question of having monks ordained.

In addition, the complementary nature of the priestly and religious vocations has been repeatedly affirmed by the Magisterium. It is one of the themes of this Year of the Priest in which the Holy Father presents St. John Marie Vianney as a model for all priests, not just the diocesan priest.

What theological description of monastic priesthood, then, might help to inform this ordination service today, in which Brothers Macaire and Nathanael will be consecrated for priestly service and Brothers Jerome and Joachim ordained deacons today in view of their future ordination to the priesthood?

Examining the church’s principle documents, trying to pinpoint where their descriptions of priestly life and ministry conflict with the life and ministry of the monk-priest, one finds a few points of convergence. These have to do chiefly with the priest’s specific configuration to Christ the High Priest.

This echoes a theme very present in monastic literature: that of describing the monastic ideals in terms of the monk’s gradual conformation to Christ. In the Rule of St. Benedict, we find images of Christ held out for imitation by the monk-priests as those of doctor and pastor, as those of one who is humble and obedient. These images were later developed by the main Cistercian writers of the twelfth century and were applied to the monk as both a leader and a disciple.

Those that apply to the abbot – pastor and medicus (shepherd and doctor)– refer to a participation in Christ’s own ministry. Those that apply to all monks – humilitas and obedientia (humility and obedience) – refer to a transformative imitation of Christ himself.

For this underlines the fact that the priest is chosen from among the community of the faithful and that, while he is called to lead the people of God by sharing in and continuing Christ’s own ministry, he remains very much a disciple, who needs continually to deepen the basic conformation to Christ he began in baptism.

Of course, there are other ways of describing monastic priesthood in the tradition. One is the link often made between religious consecration and Christ’s self-offering or self-sacrifice to the Father on behalf of the world. Monasticism itself was known as a white martyrdom.

Another is the monk’s special relationship to the Word of God. The practice of Lectio Divina as the typical form of monastic prayer puts a particular accent on the monk-priest’s life and ministry. His regular, prayerful dialogue through the written Word with the Word eternally spoken by the Father is both characteristic and transformative.

Time is set aside for it in the daily schedule and, along with choral prayer and manual labour forms, is one of the three fundamental elements of contemplative monastic life. This daily contact with the Word of God is also transformative in a way analogous to our daily contact with Christ in the Eucharist.

The Word of God today on the feast of St. Mary Magdalene, apostle to the apostles, as she is known in early traditions, suggests several themes for this ecclesial act of setting our brothers apart in sacred orders.

The Song of Songs speaks of the mystical communion of lover and the beloved and constitutes an echo of the monk’s intimacy with God in Christ in the daily communion of word and sacrament. That search by the monk’s total being for union with the beloved, with Christ, goes on day and night—“on my bed at night I sought him whom my heart loves”—until he can declare “I found him whom my heart loves”.

That finding of Christ effects in the disciple’s soul what we see taking place in Mary Magdalene in today’s gospel episode as her joy explodes and takes her back to the community of disciples. In her we see fulfilled Jesus the Good Shepherd’s declaration that he knows his own sheep by name and that they know his voice when he calls them. Afire with love, Mary could do nothing other than share this good news with the disciples: “I have seen the Lord”—a reality each of us is called to proclaim in word but also with our whole life, each of us in their own way.

For every Christian, but especially so for the monk-deacon and the monk-priest, the love of Christ, in the words of Pope Benedict XVI, is “not essentially a cosmic force, but [something] divine, transcendent. It acts on the universe but also, in itself, the love of Christ is a power that is "other," and this, his transcendent otherness, the Lord has manifested in his Passover, the "sanctity" of the "way" chosen by him to liberate us from the domination of evil… In the paschal mystery, Jesus has passed through the abyss of death, since God so willed to renew the world: through the death and resurrection of his Son "slain for all," so that all may live for him who has died and risen for them" (2 Cor 5, 16).

As we continue our celebration and prepare our brothers for a new stage in their intimate following of Christ, let us resolve to live our whole lives with total and selfless devotion so that on the last day they may hear the Lord say to them “well done, good and faithful servant, enter into the joy of your Lord”.